Profile
James Thompson, raised in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia,
had a somewhat unconventional start to his professional journey as an engineer.
"I thought it was so cool that he took helicopters to work, and my teenage logic made me think that if you became an engineer, you got to ride in helicopters"
— James
Thompson, Senior vice
president for Asia Pacific, FM
A risk that paid off
A few years in, a job listing for another engineering role caught his eye; a role that required 120 days of international travel a year, and he jumped at the opportunity to interview for it. That impulsive move set in motion a 31-year (and counting) journey at FM. The job description was also spot on; to date, Thompson has worked in 28 countries around the world.
"I like to call it industrial tourism," he says. "One day I would be working in a mine in northwest Australia, and the next, it's a chemical plant in Japan or a food production facility in Hong Kong." The lifelong friendships he's built in multiple countries have been the most fulfilling part of his career, he adds. "I don’t travel for business; I travel to go meet friends."
The ascension continued, as Thompson later accepted an opportunity to move from working on the frontlines as an engineer to the underwriting side of the business. Although his focus shifted toward more responsibility for customers, engineering knowledge remained central to his work.
"My understanding of what could cause factories, power stations, semiconductor plants or mines to shut down could be applied in a commercial framework," he says. It wasn't long before Thompson was promoted into leadership positions in Europe and Asia Pacific, where he dealt with both regulators and commercial partners across the region.
Engineered for leadership
While great leaders are usually associated with their soft skills and charisma, many bring technical abilities to the table as well. Consider two titans of Silicon Valley—Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—who both built their empires off their talent with hardware. In fact, more than 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs have an engineering degree, including Satya Nadella and Parag Agrawal, chief executive of Microsoft and former chief executive of Twitter respectively.1
FM regularly promotes engineers into leadership positions. In recent years, the company has also established leadership programmes to support and train its engineers as they ascend into management positions, as well as peer-to-peer mentoring and coaching initiatives.
This reflects FM's foundational belief in using science and data as the basis of its insurance practice, a philosophy that dates to its founding by Zachariah Allen in the 1830s. Rather than relying on actuaries, FM leverages teams of engineers to identify risks and partners with its clients to protect against losses.
"Anytime a hurricane made landfall, a team of engineers and I would go learn what went wrong, what caused the roofs to come off or why water flooded one building and not another. Then we’d take that information back and develop standards to help the industry get stronger and align with our clients' needs."
— James Thompson, Senior vice
president for Asia Pacific, FM
In 1997, for example, while earning his master’s degree, Thompson was offered a role in FM's staff engineering group, which saw him move to Boston for four years. "There, I was now developing corporate standards and engineering standards for how to mitigate against wind and other natural hazards."
"Anytime a hurricane made landfall, a team of engineers and I would go learn what went wrong, what caused the roofs to come off or why water flooded one building and not another," he says. "Then we'd take that information back and develop standards to help the industry get stronger and align with our clients' needs."
FM's emphasis on data intelligence sets it apart from competitors, many of which mostly focus on insuring large portfolios with very homogenous risks, he says. FM's portfolio is smaller and features properties with unique and large risks, making engineers especially important to the underwriting process.
With a client's paper mill in the Philippines, it was Thompson's engineering knowledge that enabled him to predict which section of the roof would come off in the event of a typhoon. Sure enough, two months later, that exact scenario came to pass. "We were trained to understand how wind would flow over a building," he says. "It was a pretty powerful thing for me, reinforcing that this practice does work, and we are good at predicting things."
That said, Thompson acknowledges that engineers face their own challenges when moving into management, as he did. "We engineers tend to want precise answers—in black and white—but leadership and management are not like that. They are about forming judgements and building consensus. Being right is not enough, and being alone isn’t going to help you." It is a mantra he has embraced over the years.
A journey of a lifetime, and counting
Looking back at how a boy from humble beginnings has had so many impactful experiences around the world, Thompson is immensely pleased with not only how his career has evolved, but more so of those around him.
"You look around the room and see people you've helped develop—or shepherd—and that's all because of the leaders who have got us to where we are." Industrial tourism might have been what lured Thompson to FM, but it would be fair to say his industrial family motivates him to stay.
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In the Asia-Pacific, FM is a licensed direct insurer in Australia, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea. For other locations in the region, such as China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam etc please contact us and we will be happy to explore your insurance needs through and in close collaboration with locally licensed insurers, our WorldReach Partners.